Speaking Truth To Power

If voters get the governments they deserve, then we worry for America’s northern neighbours. They seem such a nice, polite nation. What did they do to merit the bunch of busybodies that now want to meddle with their groceries?

In this country, we rail against the plain packaging of tobacco. Over there, it’s only one of the indignities their lifestyle police has planned for them. As Heat Street revealed this week, their fast food is threatened with warning labels, their confectionery, even their milk!

Why do these tin-pot dictators interfere in the public’s private lives? There’s a theory that, as governments cede any real powers to supranational bodies, their officers work off their yearning for authority through these petty impositions. There’s another (more conspiracy-based) that says such obsessive tinkering with lifestyle is a smokescreen – sometimes literally – for more serious problems that they can’t or won’t regulate.

The health lobby knows, for example, that exhaust pollution makes some city air un-breathable, but they don’t go round putting signs on lamp posts warning of the risks. They know that living in social housing increases your chances of dying in a house fire, but they don’t advertise the fact at estate entrances.

In these cases, they must assume, the public has sufficient information to make informed choices. Which leaves us asking: surely the same is true of the consumer goods that we eat, drink and inhale?

God knows, governments spend enough on campaigns telling us about diabetes, lung and liver cancer, heart diseases and the rest. Why do we need this information one last time at the point of purchase?

It’s just a ‘nudge’, we’re told by our betters. But it feels more like a shove. And the time will come when Trudeau and his tyranny of the trendy overstep the mark. Then those awfully polite Canucks will shove him and his kind right back.